Many in the past have attempted to protect high value articles from loss, theft, and forgery. For example, luxury goods such as purses and accessories, clothing, artwork, original documents and instruments, and related items can be lost or stolen and sometimes even forged or counterfeited. Some past solutions have used combinations of anti-theft technologies, assured provenance, and product identification technologies.
Anti-theft technologies include resonance tags, NFC chips or tags and RFID tags affixed to or embedded in the articles to be protected. Since these technologies are removable by skilled thieves, they suffer from “tag swapping”, where the tags are taken from one article and affixed to another article in order to enable theft and counterfeiting. Such tags typically report their presence without regard to whether the tag is still associated with the original article the tag was intended to identify.
Assured provenance involves affixing a unique serial number or other product or item identifier to an article, either physically or electronically, that is tied to manufacturer-provided provenance information. The unique serial number or other ID, in digital and/or mechanical form, can be forged, permitting counterfeit item distribution. A manufacturer's database of “authentic” items generally does not provide public visibility into the current status of an article, so a resale business generally has no means to determine whether an article has been tampered with or is even authentic.
Biometrics (a form of people-based attributes thought to be highly individualized, such as fingerprints or retinal scans) have been traditionally used in secure systems to “unlock” repositories of digital secrets (e.g. cryptographic keys). Such biometric information is sometimes used by the digital system to grant access and/or protect the integrity of other parts of the system. Some such schemes in the past had weaknesses around spoofing of the biometric information, the false positive/negative rate of the reader (e.g. reliability), and/or integrity of underlying device. Fingerprint and other biometric readers have also proven to be straightforward to spoof or hack in the past.